Monday, October 05, 2015

Why every infertile couple should share their experiences

Many infertile couples have a book within them. Infertility changes you as a person, and you experience lots of ups and downs over time. Many couples would like to be able to share their journey with others, to help them cope better. After all, the best way to help yourself is to help someone else ! The trouble, of course, is that most people aren't very good writers and they aren't sure how to go about writing a book.

The solution is simple. The trick is not to write the book - you need to speak the book. Let me explain.

In the past, people like King Ashoka or Julius Caesar never actually wrote anything. They would dictate, and they would have a professional called a scribe, who would actually transcribe whatever they said onto paper. This is an extremely successful model and makes a lot of sense. After all, your core competence is the real-life wisdom you have acquired, rather than your actual ability to write. The trick is not to write, but to dictate or to talk whatever is inside your head, so that you can then share it with the rest of the world.

This is actually quite intuitive. After all, a book, when it's well-written, is a conversation between the author and the reader, and the best way to have a conversation is, of course, to talk. One way of structuring this is to actually ask yourself a series of questions about your topic and then answer these questions. Imagine a friend is quizzing you about the doctors you've been to. What questions would she ask ? And how would you answer her ? Each of these answers could actually become a paragraph within the book, and you put in a lot of paragraphs together, it becomes a chapter, and you put in a lot of chapters, it becomes a book.

The trick is not to start with writing a book. It's better to start with writing a blog post, for example. It could be short, it could be long, it could just be a para, or it could be a complete chapter, depending on when the muse strikes you. You'll get better with this over time, and your skills will progressively improve. The good thing about sharing it as a post is that you may well start getting feedback from your readers, who will then ask you pertinent questions, and once you answer these, you'll get more content for your book as time goes by, so that this can become a positive virtuous cycle.

People are a little scared about things like grammatical mistakes or spelling, but you can easily get professionals who can help you resolve these problems. With today's technology, it's actually become remarkable easy to do so. Thus, you can record whatever you want to say onto your smartphone, whenever inspiration strikes you. You can then get a freelancer on fiverr.com, or your secretary, or skilled transcriptionists at www.rev.com to transcribe this. You can also use Dragon Naturally Speaking software to transcribe your voice to text extremely efficiently. This means that within a few minutes you have an article of about 800 to 1,000 words. For example, this article was "written" by recording my thoughts on my smartphone, and then uploading it to www.rev.com, who then sent me a perfectly formatted post in a few hours, which you are now reading !

All you need to do is just talk to your smartphone. Pretend that this is either a fellow- patient or your mom or your sister or a 9-year old child or a student or even a newspaper reporter who is asking you questions, and your answers to these questions will form the core of your book. If you get stuck, you can always tell the story of how your mother in law made you cry - story telling is a great way of sharing your wisdom!

Writing a book can be a great learning experience for you, because you will actually have to sharpen your thinking. This is a great way of sharing your information with others. The cost of publishing a book electronically is now practically free, so I actually think it's irresponsible of expert patients who have so much stored wisdom to share , to not do this.

It's well worth the effort, trust me ! It will help you transmute all the suffering you have gone through into something valuable !

So, now that you don't have an excuse, what's stopping you from writing the book which is within you? Your first attempt need not be perfect, but a book can be a work in progress, and the great thing about electronic publishing is you can keep on tweaking and refining it until you're finally happy with the product !